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Ivy didn’t blame her father for disappearing. She wouldn’t blame him if he didn’t come back at all. If he flew far away and started up with a new house and a new wife and new children. Children he knew for sure were his own.

Why should she care if her father left her mother?

Odds were, he wasn’t her father anyway. This had been Ivy’s first thought that night on the landing—that she was the one who wasn’t theirs.

Hearing that conversation fed the flame of something already smoldering inside her—the conviction that she wasn’t part of them, that she didn’t want to be part of them.

That they would set themselves up as obstacles to all the things (things she couldn’t yet even name) she was going to want in the next several years. Ivy hated obstacles.

Her second thought was that she was relieved not to be George’s daughter.

She felt a bit ashamed of that, but it wasn’t her fault that her mother—Ruth’s mother, George—was so boring.

Yes, she had her little airplane. Her father had called it that once—“Your mother’s little airplane”—and George had burst into tears.

Pathetic, thought Ivy. Also pathetic: her mother and Uncle Frank making moony eyes at one another when they thought no one else was looking.

She didn’t want a life anything like her mother’s, which consisted mainly of flying her little plane (but always circling right back to Enid, never actually going anywhere exciting), planning meals and shopping, and going to her club luncheons.

There was Garden Club and Literary Guild and the Women’s Club.

None of which Grandma Adele attended. “Just an excuse for grown women to play dress-up,” Adele had said when Ivy asked her why she didn’t go.

“Not my sort of thing.” Not Ivy’s sort of thing either.

And now, no one else could reasonably expect it to become her sort of thing.

Which left her free to consider exactly what her sort of thing was.

Which left her free to be anything or anyone she wanted to be.

She didn’t want to be like Ruth. Ruth had made her explain what they’d overheard, even though she knew perfectly well what it meant.

Her supposed sister wasn’t playing dumb.

She just lacked imagination. She preferred not to see bad things.

Ruth was on her way to being a very good grown-up.

Pretending not to see what people didn’t want you to see was a huge part of being an adult.

You had to pretend you didn’t notice that Aunt Helen kept her body always between Uncle Frank and your mother.

You had to pretend you didn’t notice when Dad packed extra for what was supposed to be a one-nighter.

You had to pretend you hadn’t noticed he’d been gone when he came back weeks later.

You had to pretend practically every boy in school was smarter than you were.

And that you were just so impressed with everything they did or said.

You had to pretend your parents were happy.

You had to pretend you were sisters when you weren’t.

Ruth was good at all this pretending. In fact, she seemed to prefer it.

“I don’t want to spy anymore,” she said, a few months after their fateful night on the stairs.

They’d spent the intervening weeks combing through the file cabinet and through desk drawers, scanning the photo albums on the living room bookshelf.

In the file cabinet they found, neatly labeled in their mother’s precise penmanship, a manila folder for each of them.

In each, their immunization records, their report cards, their birth certificates with embossed seals on watermarked paper.

“See,” Ruth had said, “same day, same hospital, same parents.”

“Haven’t you heard of counterfeiting?” asked Ivy. “Or forgery?”

“It’s got a seal on it,” said Ruth, tracing her finger around the gold foil in the lower corner of her birth certificate. Ivy wasn’t persuaded.

In the photo album, they found what they’d already seen many times.

Photos of the two of them as tiny infants in matching caps, as larger infants in matching sunsuits, as toddlers, as elementary schoolers, losing and gaining teeth, hair shorter or longer.

Smiling, always smiling. Pretending even before they knew they were pretending.

Ruth had stopped smiling at Ivy. She’d stopped the investigation. “We’re only going to find out it’s me. And, honestly, I’d rather not.”

Ivy disagreed. She was positive she was the one who didn’t belong.

And she’d much rather know it for certain than suspect it.

Than to have other people know what she didn’t.

When people knew what you didn’t, it gave them a raw sort of power over you, a power you sensed even if you couldn’t define it.

“Please,” she begged.

But Ruth refused to do any more spying.

Fine for Ruth. She was good at pretending, but Ivy was terrible at it. Because she was terrible at it, she was always being told to mind her expression, to watch her tone, to for goodness’ sake, just behave, Ivy .

She was terrible at behaving and pretending, but she was very good at other things. Kissing, for example.

At one of Cindy’s sleepovers, Sandra, who’d recently kissed an actual boy, announced that she would now kiss each of them, a lips-on demonstration.

Ivy was tired of Sandra’s games. She didn’t want to kiss Sandra, but the other girls seemed eager.

Ivy missed the days when she could have said, Sounds like a dumb idea , and they all would have looked to her for a better one.

But lately, if she didn’t go along, they pestered and pleaded until she gave in.

When it was her turn, she closed her eyes, opened her mouth, and twirled her tongue around Sandra’s for a bit until, thank God, it was over.

After the final girl had a turn, Sandra announced that the best kisser of the night was Ivy.

This was shocking, but also somehow reassuring.

She was ready, she decided, to kiss an actual boy herself.

None of the boys in her class appealed to her.

When her mother announced that the Rutledges were going to a party with the Bridlemiles and Frank Jr. would be coming over, she decided he’d be ideal.

He was older, but not too old. He was good looking enough.

And he didn’t talk much, so he’d be unlikely to gossip about her later.

That night, as soon as Ruth left the room, Ivy slid closer to Frank Jr. He didn’t scoot away.

She had to act fast—Ruth could return at any moment.

She leaned against him. After a second, he put his arm around her.

She tilted her face up toward his, and that was all it took.

They were kissing. And it was much better than kissing Sandra.

He pulled her closer. She liked that. He kissed her harder.

She liked that too. He slid his hand beneath her sweater.

Research with other girls couldn’t begin to compare.

Then Ruth came stomping and coughing down the hallway.

Ivy unwrapped herself from Frank Jr. but didn’t move away.

She sat snug against him, savoring the warmth of his leg alongside hers, until their parents got home.

She stuck close to the phone for the rest of the week, certain Frank would call to ask her out for a date, or at least ask if he could come over.

But every call was some old lady wanting to talk to Grandma Adele about a pinging engine.

With each day that passed, she grew antsier.

By Saturday, she felt ridiculous. Was she going to mope around, waiting for a boy to call? No, she was not.

“Let’s go to the movies,” she said to Ruth. If there was any upside to being a twin, it was that she never had to venture out into the world alone.

Ruth wanted to see Operation Petticoat , which sounded like a stupid film, but the movie itself wasn’t the point. Being away from the phone when Frank Jr. called was the point.

“Hey,” said Ruth as they stepped away from the concession stand with their popcorn, “there’s Frank Jr. You should say hello.” Ivy noted the “you” as well as her sister’s insinuating tone. “How’d you know he’d be here?”

“I didn’t,” said Ivy.

Ruth smirked at her, then sang out, “Hi, Frank!”

Frank, waiting in line with a crew of pimply high school boys, lifted his chin at them.

Fine. She could play it cool too. “Hi, Frank,” she said, not slowing her step as she walked past him.

“Enjoy the show.” She proceeded toward the theater entrance, not too fast in case he called out for them to wait, in case he wanted to introduce her to his friends. To ask if they could sit together.

“Who are those two?” asked a boy with a greasy ducktail.

“Nobody,” said Frank Jr. “Just my parents’ friends’ kids. Just some little girls.”

Ruth giggled all the way through the movie—something about a pink submarine with nurses on board—but Ivy barely paid attention. He’d called her a little girl. She’d been so stupid, assuming he liked her. Boys would kiss anyone—hadn’t Sandra told them that?

If she couldn’t tell—even when she was kissing one—how much he cared about her, then she’d make sure no boy ever knew whether she cared about him either. Better yet, she vowed as the lights came up, she’d never allow herself to care at all.

Freshman year, she made another vow: to put some social distance between herself and Ruth.

They’d been defined as twins all their lives.

And it wasn’t even true! They looked enough alike, but they were different in any way that mattered.

Ruth was obsessed with fitting in. Ivy wanted to be unconventional.

She cultivated an air of sophisticated detachment.

Girls called her stuck up. Boys called her for dates.

She never went out with any particular boy for long.

She knew the kids at school whispered that she was fast. Better fast than dull, she thought.

Even so, the cafeteria felt like a minefield.

By junior year, she avoided it by spending her lunch hours in Mme Forrest’s classroom, practicing her French conversation.

French came naturally to Ivy. Her teacher said she had an excellent ear and allowed her to run through four years of coursework in two.

Mme Forrest had married an airman at the end of the war and then found herself in the middle of Oklahoma—a place so unlike France, she felt as though she’d traveled all the way to Mars—or so Madame claimed.

The airman, like Ivy’s father, had become a commercial pilot, and Madame had accepted a position teaching French at Enid High.

She complained, in French, about the provincialism of Enid, the narrow-mindedness of Americans when it came to sex.

Mme Forrest was elegant and sophisticated.

Like Aunt Vivian. Ivy couldn’t understand why she stayed in Enid.

“ Amour, ” said Madame. Ivy rolled her eyes.

She intended to be elegant and sophisticated somewhere far, far away from Enid, Oklahoma.

She already had a departure plan in place.

She and Ruth and some other girls (more Ruth’s friends than hers, but Ruth had been thrilled when Ivy asked to join them) were driving down to Dallas for a postgraduation shopping trip.

Their parents had promised them money for it as a graduation gift.

Ivy planned to use hers for a bus ticket out of Dallas.

If she was careful, she could make it last for a while.

She hadn’t decided where she’d go and what she’d do, but these details would work themselves out.

She’d go somewhere they’d never think to look.

And she’d do something ... unexpected.